Student Housing Choices and Neighborhood Change: Brown University 1937–1987

Abstract

The formal ambitions and societal expectations of anchor institutions have shifted over time. Many universities have evolved from walled-off enclaves, to self-interested urban redevelopers, to mutual gain negotiators. Detailed accounts exist of universities, as anchor institutions, directly displacing low-income communities of color by utilizing the higher education provisions of urban renewal. This case study of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, adds to this history by documenting the university’s contribution to the diminution of a working-class neighborhood of color specifically through student residency philosophies and policies, enrollment expansion, and real-estate decisions, during 1937–1987. Brown University’s choices played out in a neighborhood already scarred by interstate highway construction and urban renewal. Drawing from primary source materials on institutional decision-making this work examines the transformation of Brown University’s models of student housing amidst evolving community concerns about the demolition of historic properties and push back around increasing displacement pressures. Several issues and research directions for the new era of equity centered anchor work emerge from this historical recounting of an anchor institution’s student housing choices.

1. Introduction

The place-based nature of institutions of higher education (IHE) marks them as anchor institutions. Yet, the communities where IHE are embedded also anchor place; they too are anchor institutions [1,2]. This historical case study examines Brown University’s student residency philosophies and policies, enrollment expansion, and residential real estate holding decisions during 1937–1987. The authors contend IHE anchor work can benefit from explicating the neighborhood impacts of the various models of student housing adopted by universities. The demand for student housing (versus employee housing) is a feature that sets IHE apart from other anchors and private companies. There is a need to better understand the impacts various models of student housing have on local housing markets and to consider how student housing choices interact with other forces in the larger ecosystem of neighborhood development [3,4]. Invariably, Brown’s student housing models impacted its surrounding neighborhoods, with community concerns corresponding to the changing student housing modes embraced by the university. Concerns from some about demolitions for dormitories in College Hill spawned a national model for preserving the historic fabric of neighborhoods. These concerns gave way to confrontations with residents of the Fox Point neighborhood when an increasing off-campus student population filled rental housing units. Fox Point, an adjacent working-class neighborhood of color already reeling from early 1960s highway construction and urban renewal, pushed back against student encroachment in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. This research highlights actions of institutional self-interest even in the face of internal dissent and community petitions raising concerns of displacement pressures.

Framed within the historical evolution of IHE anchor theory and work, this case study documents divergent directions of Brown University student housing policy as one philosophy gave way to another. The first philosophy sought to tightly regulate the student residential experience by constructing an academic enclave for students that was within, but not of, the city. The second—in line with Brown’s now dominant academic and social ethos of student independence—espoused choice and individuality in living arrangements, ultimately encouraging student occupation of privately owned, off-campus residences, as enrollment soared.

A great degree of attention has been devoted to more obvious examples of anchor institutions’ participation in urban transformation—such as the participation in urban renewal of the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University that occurred simultaneously to these evolutions at Brown University [5,6,7]. This case study encourages us to devote more attention to the harder-to-see, incremental changes in anchor institution decision-making that can, nonetheless, negatively affect neighboring communities. Many of the actions underscore how disposession of IHE real estate can impact conditions as much as the, more often considered, acquisition of property. Over time, IHE have taken on the challenge of innovative, complicated, and risk-taking anchor work. This case study suggests IHE anchor theoryand models must continue to progress to be accountable to IHE “legacy of place” [8].

While the labeling of universities in the United States as “anchor” institutions is an early 21st century phenomenon, histories reveal deeper roots of the characteristics these anchors share, that of being culturally and economically potent non-profit, place-based institutions [9,10,11]. Ehlenz presents a concise and useful summation of the progressing role of IHE that defines five eras of IHE anchor evolution and references emerging trends [11]. The eras are marked by prominent IHE role shifts while individual institutions moved through these changes at their own pace—or not at all. To provide a common context for this research, a brief outline of this evolution is presented, and then attention turns to recent research themes reflecting the “dynamism” of IHE [12] (p. 5).

During the first era, scholars note, private IHE are rooted in the typology of “gated”, “aloof”, inward looking “enclaves” [4,13,14] (pp. 25, 343, 2). The imagery of “ivory tower” and “’town versus gown” conveys the academy as apart from, and unlike, the community where it is rooted. Many private IHE have community links formed from religious affiliations and a purpose to educate for the ministry [9]. Public higher education in the United States, however, in the form of land grant universities, was explicitly charged with supporting local agriculture and economies [11]. This late 19th century model of public IHE incorporated more practical curriculum and existed along with private IHE.

A new potential role emerged from urbanization and industrialization, the second era, as some IHE documented and engaged with the urban conditions of the working poor. This era, titled by Ehlenz, “urban as laboratory,” was marked by IHE researching the problems of public health, education, and unsafe dwellings [11] (p. 77).

The third era, beginning roughly in the mid 20th century, is marked by a rapid increase in the demand for higher education. When enrollment ballooned, some IHE used the heavy-handed tools of urban renewal to expand their campus’ footprint to meet a growing need for student housing and post-war research facilities. Demolition and redevelopment commenced with the attendant displacement of residents and businesses. This history is well documented and has an enduring legacy of community mistrust and rancor [6,15,16]. Many of these physical alterations reinforced campuses as separate elite places—reflecting the endurance of the founding model of private IHE.

The fourth and fifth eras develop in the later part of the 20th century and are practiced (concurrently) today [11]. Cities faced crises attributable to the decline of manufacturing, white flight, globalization, and the redeployment of private capital. Two IHE responses emerged to fill an expanding void of revenues and leadership [17]. The fourth era focuses on university–community partnerships driven by the IHE traditional mission and produces engaged teaching, research, and scholarship. Service-learning and offices of civic engagement become common and the academic resources of IHE are used to problem-solve with communities [18]. The fifth era gives prominence to the economic clout anchors have as employers, consumers, developers, and investors. Explicit strategies arise for anchors to serve community interests while fulfilling these corporate roles [19]. Highlighting the major shift of this work, Rodin calls these novel economically based forms of anchor engagement, “institutional redefinition” [20] (p. 237). Baum, on the other hand, warns of the overselling of these engagement initiatives given IHE resource limitations and persistent, deep-seated systemic inequities [21]. While his cautionary account uses fourth era examples, the themes are applicable to fifth era projects.

These late twentieth century IHE innovations were supported by government agencies, philanthropic organizations, and think tanks [22]. An infrastructure with grants, associations, conferences, journals, and grey literature on IHE as anchors, came into being and continues to thrive [23]. Ehlenz’s fifth era is marked by IHE engaging in revitalization efforts that can incorporate all or various combinations of IHE assets. Engaged academic activities, economic development training and business development, purchasing locally, community-capacity building, and real estate development are possible IHE anchor activities. There are as many forms of IHE anchor engagement as there are IHE. The individualized responses are shaped by the size of the IHE, the public or private character and fiscal soundness of the IHE, the leadership vision of the IHE, and the historical relationship between the IHE and the community [18].

Today, the moniker of “anchor” comes with an assumption of commitment to community [24]. For public IHE a direct accountability to the people is clear. However, as the recipients of numerous public benefits private IHE are also accountable to their surrounding communities. Public subsidies for private IHE include a non-profit tax status designation and public funds in the form of research grants, tuition loans and grants, and construction loan subsidies [1,16,25]. Specific construction projects may also benefit from public contributions in the form of street abandonments [20] or the disposition of surplus public properties. While reciprocity of benefits for the public subsidies received is recognized best practice, scholars are increasingly focusing attention on the nature and distribution of these “mutual benefits” [19,26].

With fifth era projects completed and chronicled, recent research scrutinizes IHE anchor objectives and outcomes; explores the effectiveness of models for the full integration of IHE academic and corporate functions; and calls for IHE engagement that centers social equity [1,8,25]. These inquiries have the potential to ground a sixth era in the evolution of the form of IHE anchor work (or “University Civic Engagement 3.0” in the framing of others) [27]. These are also the inquiries this historical research seeks to engage by examining the internal decisions on student housing made by one IHE, Brown University.

Fifth era case studies document revitalization success in the form of decreases in crime, increases in property values, and new mixed income neighborhoods and businesses [14,20]. These detail the work of IHE partnerships with communities to design revitalization projects with mutual benefits. IHE are not philanthropic institutions. Community partnerships must have realistic expectations as IHE manage human and capital resources to fulfill all aspects of their mission. While non-profit, many IHE use some functions to fund other aspects of their operations. The literature notes there have been varied motivations for anchor projects. Working with communities can be simply transactional, or increasingly IHE, more than other anchor institutions, have come to appreciate there need not be “a decoupling of social responsibility from self-interests” [10] (p. 13).

IHE real estate decisions in urbanized areas are particularly conflict prone as development alters familiar conditions in a permanent way. Residents resist such change, while IHE view expansion and improvements as essential to maintaining standing [28]. Scholars highlight the need for IHE to improve mutual benefit practices by elevating the outcomes for vulnerable groups, including the well-documented displacement of communities of color and gentrification even in highly touted IHE revitalization programs [1,9,11,14,25]. Some critiques contend the mixed results of IHE fifth era development are a product of the competitive nature of higher education and the multiplicity of objectives pursued. Etienne’s account sees IHE real estate development as primarily designed for IHE constituencies with some residents benefiting, and others being physically displaced or left feeling alienated from the redeveloped spaces [15]. Brown et al. establish some groups experience IHE engagement as “asset extraction” that jeopardizes resident health with stress from displacement and the disruption of social networks [1] (p. 85). Ehlenz asks if communities and universities share a common definition of quality of life, and the Democracy Collaborative proposes IHE “integrate equity measures” for more accurate outcome assessment [7,29](p. 31).

That the benefits of revitalization come with costs is a reality not limited to development undertaken by anchor institutions. Newer interrogations are pushing IHE anchor work for fuller outcome assessments to elevate consideration of the unequal distribution of harm. This gives rise to the question of how anchor work gives due consideration to community interests (particularly of those with less power) and if so, whether the internal structure of IHE can morph to achieve accountability to all parts of the community [24]. The understanding of the full impacts of fifth era engagement has led to a question of whether IHE structures are well-matched for the next generation partnerships that center social equity.

The final emergent theme is the centering of social equity in IHE anchor work. The current strategic plan of the Anchor Institutions Task Force (AITF) sets out a vision for “values-based” partnerships for “bringing equitable growth in communities” and “emphasizing racial equity” [30] (pp. 2, 3). Others have called for an IRB-type body with community representation to review all IHE anchor work [1]. A call for ethical decision making suggests IHE physical revitalization should be more than a standard real estate deal (e.g., compensation considered “whole” by offering the appraised market value alone); instead, it must “draw upon the norms that give the university its civic authority and status” [28] (p. 287). A 2014 report by the Democracy Collaborative invokes a sixth era of IHE anchor work marked by a “deeper level” of engagement in order “to better the long-term welfare of the places in which they reside in general, and the welfare of low-income residents in particular” [29] (p.x). Despite the mixed record of fifth-generation initiatives, supporters of IHE anchor work see potential for improved outcomes.

2. Methods

Brown University was founded in 1764, the seventh college in America [31]. Its campus, the academic home of over 7000 enrolled undergraduates and 2600 graduate students, is located on the “East Side” of Providence, RI, principally within the neighborhood of “College Hill” [32]. While the East Side is today an enclave of wealth and whiteness in an otherwise predominantly low-income, non-white city [33], a few short decades ago, many East Side neighborhoods offered some of Providence’s most affordable housing opportunities and served as home to many of the city’s working-class non-white and immigrant populations. For instance, by 1961, the neighborhoods of Mount Hope and Lippitt Hill, located to Brown’s north, housed more than one-third of the city’s Black population [34]. To Brown’s south, the neighborhood of Fox Point had long served as a home to incoming immigrant communities, first from Ireland in the 19th century, then from Portugal, and finally from the west African archipelago of Cape Verde [35].

The case study component of this article draws from research completed at the Brown University Archives, located in the John Hay Library’s Special Collections. In constructing the following narrative, we drew upon 20 of the Archives’ collections. These included the Brown University Presidential Papers spanning 1937 to 2000. We also examined the collections of Brown administrators, trustees, and governing committees whose work concerned residential housing, government and community relations, and the maintenance of the university’s physical plant. The construction of the interstate highway and the adjacent urban renewal were clear physical manifestations of neighborhood change. This archival research pulls back the cover on aspects of the larger and longer-term shifts in the neighborhood by revealing less well-known university reasoning and choices. Archival research adds value by providing evidence from the time of the events being studied and may disclose perspectives from previously private or unknown documents [36].

We do note, however, that archival research has its limits. A cautionary side of this work is the need to consider the evolution of language. An example is the late 1960s and 1970s use, by various parties, of the term “displacement.” At that time, the term was a blunt instrument masking the nuance of the current understanding of various forms of displacement, which has emerged from the intervening decades of empirical and sociological study [37,38,39]. Another constraint of archival work can be the narrow interests covered by the content. The Brown archives do not include depth on financial aspects of decisions or the experience of community members. Our findings do, however, align with and support existing narratives of the neighborhood’s change and community displacement as told by residents themselves. Scholar and filmmaker Claire Andrade-Watkins, a Fox Point native, has produced two documentaries giving voice to the Fox Point experience of neighborhood change (see the critically acclaimed 2006 Some Funny Kind of Porto Rican? and the 2011 Hi, Neighbor: Memories of Loss and Displacement) [40,41]. The research presented here comports with this neighborhood narrative as it engages an under-examined element of the neighborhood change—Brown’s student housing decision-making.

This article also features a series of maps representing the spatial distribution of Brown University’s off-campus undergraduate student population through the decades. These maps also draw from archival records—Brown University student and staff directories for the years 1942, 1949, 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990 located in the university’s Special Collections.. The irregularities of years in this selection scheme (1942 and 1949) were the result of missing directories; the student directories of 1940 and 1950 were not available in the Special Collections. The caption for each map specifies what classification of Brown students (graduate, undergraduate) are included in the maps, due to limitations of the corresponding directory. For instance, maps between 1942 and 1960 do not document the off-campus residences of female students at Pembroke College—Brown’s “sister college” from 1891 to 1971. Additionally, only maps from 1970–1990 include the off-campus residences of Brown graduate students; student directories do not include graduate students until the mid-1960s, when Brown’s graduate student population began to grow significantly. Each map also includes approximations of the Brown’s total undergraduate student population living off-campus in the City of Providence for each year; these percentages are calculated from the Providence addresses in the directories, and enrollment data from Brown’s Office of Institutional Research [42]. To present these off-campus distributions in map form, the first step involved the digitization of these records. We extracted Providence-based, off-campus student addresses and into Microsoft Excel spreadsheet form. Once digitization was complete, the information was plotted using ArcMap software. These maps focus on the neighborhoods of the East Side of Providence where most undergraduates have lived. It is important to note that these maps are included primarily for illustrative purposes. While these maps are the first-known attempts to document the spatial distribution of the off-campus Brown student body across time, their central aim is to orient the reader to the East Side of Providence and general trends.

This work is not a comprehensive or economic analysis of the impacts of Brown on housing in the Fox Point neighborhood, nor of other factors contributing to the change in housing conditions. The discussion is also not exhaustive when it comes to campus expansion and construction projects undertaken by the university during this period. This work does not measure displacement or attempt to quantify Brown’s contribution to the larger forces of displacement in the neighborhood that began with the use of eminent domain. The maturing literature on measuring displacement has revealed the distinctions within the topic and the limitations of various measurements [43]. This work relies on the archival record that indicates, after highway construction, large numbers of Fox Point residents and community organizations spoke out about student driven displacement as did two university related committees (one sanctioned, one unsanctioned), and Brown administrators acknowledged the university’s pressure on the remaining low income residents of the adjacent neighborhood. A history of Cape Verdeans in Rhode Island also notes the community engaged the university, and landlords renting to students, on displacement pressures [35].

The focus of this research is intently set to understanding the university’s decisions relative to on and off-campus student housing over the specified 50-year period. A leading figure in the theory and practice of university anchor work, Rodin, states:

It is important to note that a university can affect the neighborhood housing market dramatically simply by changing its own on-campus housing policies and practices, such as the number of available on-campus beds for undergraduates, the quality of the on-campus residential experience, and whether or not students are required to live in campus housing if it is available.

[44] (p. 87)

As a deep dive into this aspect of a dynamic housing market, this case study gives rich detail of an IHE decision-making process.

3. Case Study

3.1. University Enclave to Urban Renewal

When incoming Brown University president Henry Wriston arrived to Providence in 1937—just as authoritarian governments were on the rise in Germany, Italy, and Japan—he believed that Brown was entrusted with a task of international significance. Brown was an institution committed to the advancement of liberal education, a method of education that Wriston believed “strengthens man to wrestle with eternal problems as well as to cope with the daily round” [45] (p. 23). By forging future generations of free-thinking elites empowered to wrestle with these “eternal problems” and able to guide society with moral leadership, Wriston argued, liberal education—and the institutions that advanced it—could help to preserve liberal democracy across the globe. Creating a physical campus environment that was “hospitable” to the development of such societal elites, therefore, became the central thrust of President Wriston’s administration [45].

Entrusted with this awesome responsibility, Wriston believed that, while a university would ideally influence every element of the academic experience, particular attention must be devoted to the student’s residential experience. If carefully planned to induce structure in the lives of students, dormitories, Wriston said, could be essential sites of liberal learning on a college campus where students of different backgrounds and persuasions could engage in the respectful exchange of free ideas. At the time of his arrival, Brown’s housing infrastructure offered anything but the carefully planned residential experience Wriston espoused: The great majority of Brown students lived in decrepit, privately owned fraternity houses scattered throughout the East Side. Wriston desperately desired to correct this by attaining a fully residential college, where all Brown students would live in university-owned accommodations—and under the university’s watchful gaze.

Brown’s residential college would also serve a more pragmatic and arguably less honorable purpose: To, in the words of a Brown vice president in 1945, “shut out the city” and protect university community members from the surrounding city and the urban influences deemed “inhospitable” to the university’s mission [46]. “The residential college is not an ivory tower,” Brown’s Dean of the College would suggest. “It is an island…The insularity of the residential college allows it to develop a distinct character and to concentrate its own impact on those who come to it” [47]. With no shortage of irony, Brown leaders argued that by attaining a fully residential college—an enclave within, but not of, the city—the university would best advance liberal education and most successfully produce future leaders for Providence, the nation, and the world.

In pursuit of the residential college, between 1947 and 1957, Wriston and his successor Barnaby Keeney would carry out one of the nation’s most ambitious programs of university residential construction. In those 10 years, Brown added more than 1500 beds to its campus, bringing the university’s housing capacity to 83 percent of its students, a high-water mark for the university [48]. However, this accomplishment came at a serious cost to the city: Nearly five city blocks were razed to make way for the university’s new housing. Among the more than 60 buildings demolished in the dormitories’ wake were numerous homes of architectural significance to Providence and its historic, colonial fabric. The destruction of these homes would spawn the 1956 creation of one of the most influential private organizations in the city’s history, the Providence Preservation Society (PPS).

While the PPS’s founding purpose was to slow the destruction of historic structures by institutions like Brown, the society would quickly become the standard bearer of urban renewal on the East Side of Providence. Composed of members from the city’s white, wealthy “first families”—many of whom were, ironically, Brown trustees, alumni, or faculty—the PPS would guide the creation of two critically important projects that would shape the East Side’s future. The first—the College Hill Study, a founding document of the mid-century historic preservation movement that swept many older American cities—evaluated some 1350 buildings, determining which East Side homes deserved “preservation” and which “renewal” [49,50]. By and large, while the study called for the preservation of homes in the East Side’s core—areas closest to Brown—it advocated widespread clearance of the East Side’s peripheral areas, areas most likely to be occupied by low-income communities and communities of color. The College Hill Study’s recommendations were ultimately set into motion by the federally funded East Side Renewal Project, Providence’s largest urban renewal project to date, guided in large part by members of the PPS.

While Brown did not operate the bulldozers of urban renewal that tumbled the “slum dwellings” adjacent to its campus, as did many of its peer institutions like the University of Chicago, Penn, and Columbia during this era, its presence and participation in East Side urban renewal is undeniable and ubiquitous. First, its pursuit of a residential college ignited the guiding force of renewal on the East Side—the PPS (an organization led from 1985–1987 by a Brown Vice President of University Relations [51].) Meanwhile, its presence incentivized speculators to see immense profit opportunities inherent in transforming once-low-income East Side neighborhoods to instead meet the needs of the university community. For example, the East Side neighborhood to the north of campus, Lippitt Hill—once home to a plurality of the city’s Black population—was replaced by a low-rise, middle-income urban renewal development called “University Heights,” specifically targeted towards meeting the housing needs of Brown’s growing graduate student population, as the development’s name attests.

Just as Brown shaped East Side urban renewal, East Side urban renewal shaped Brown, dictating the direction that the university’s physical campus and, increasingly, its off-campus student population would grow. By the mid-1960s, the historic preservation and urban renewal of the East Side almost entirely enclosed Brown’s campus in a ring of newly expensive real estate, “preserved” to Brown’s east and west, and “redeveloped” to its north. Consistent with the findings of Austrian and Norton, such affluent areas were “less vulnerable to university expansion” as they could deploy financial and political influence to fend off encroachment [52] (p. 198). As the university set its eyes on student population growth, its campus and off-campus presence would proceed southerly, directly into the heart of the working-class neighborhood of Fox Point, the stronghold of Providence’s Cape Verdean and Portuguese populations (see Figure 1).

Brown University’s main campus is in the Providence neighborhood of College Hill, which was the subject of the 1959 College Hill Study. Partly in response to Brown’s expansion, College Hill became a focus area for historic preservation, and ultimately the location of a National Historic Landmark District. To the west of College Hill, the South Main Street Urban Renewal Redevelopment, and to the north, the University Heights Urban Renewal Redevelopment and to the south, Interstate 195, were completed in the early 1960s. To the east, the neighborhoods of Blackstone and Wayland were predominantly affluent single-family homes. Source: Authors.

3.2. Shift in Student Housing: Philosophy Off-Campus Housing Expansion

By the mid-1960s, the once-dominant belief that Brown student housing should be highly regulated, structured, and contained within the university’s bounds was questioned, challenged, and ultimately abandoned. Just years after the completion of the university’s new dormitories, Brown students, faculty, and administrators began to condemn Presidents Wriston and Keeney’s new dormitories for creating what students believed were stifling, cookie-cutter living environments. In the mid-1960s, a dominant university ethos of independence and individual choice was emerging at Brown, an ethos embodied by Brown’s now quintessential Open Curriculum, the academic reforms adopted in 1969 that removed all distribution requirements and advanced at Brown a truly unparalleled degree of undergraduate academic freedom. “Our age is characterized by a high valuation of individuality,” the university’s 1966 Housing Committee noted. “Controlled and efficient diversity is, in our day, more desirable than controlled and efficient uniformity” [53]. The residential college, in many ways, was increasingly recognized as a relic of the past, unsuited for the emerging Brown student of the 1960s. Just as Brown advanced freedom and self-autonomy in academics, students and faculty argued that the university could advance student independence by endorsing self-determination of living arrangements.

In unprecedented numbers, Brown students, beginning in the mid-1960s, sought such living arrangements by evading the humdrum of dormitory life entirely, moving into off-campus homes in Brown’s surrounding neighborhoods. During the decade, the university’s off-campus undergraduate student population grew by nearly 300 percent, reaching over 550 students by 1969 [54]. Between 1961 and 1969, the total Brown off-campus student population—which included the university’s ballooning graduate school population—had nearly doubled, growing from 921 to 1787 students [55].

While Brown’s pivot to a housing system predicated upon choice and individuality may have originated in the philosophical convictions of its students, it was institutionalized by university administrators for far more pragmatic reasons. By adopting a residential approach that emphasized choice, university leaders felt absolved of the expensive responsibility to expand on-campus housing accommodations with the same speed that the university had under Wriston and Keeney. As a result, between 1970 and 1990, the university’s on-campus housing capacity remained largely static.

However, the size of Brown’s student population did not. In the 1960s and 1970s, it expanded fervently, in part, thanks to the absorption of Pembroke College—Brown’s separate and distinct women’s college—into the university proper in July 1971. Off-campus residences offered the university a massive supply of beds for its expanding student body, and all the better, these beds came at no real cost to the university. Brown worked tirelessly to fill East Side homes with its students. The university established an off-campus housing bureau that advertised and inspected privately. owned units to prepare them for use by students [56]. It even became one of the East Side’s largest landlords, owning more than 50 buildings throughout the East Side through its landholding company, Fairview, Inc. [57]. When on-campus housing shortages grew worse, Fairview would terminate leases with non-university affiliates to make room in its apartments for more students. By the mid-1970s, off-campus housing was not just one more housing choice available to Brown students; privately owned, off-campus homes became essential components of Brown’s housing infrastructure, ensuring that all members of the expanding Brown student body had a bed of their own.

However, again, Brown’s housing efforts ran counter to community needs: The university’s deepening dependence on off-campus housing was causing serious problems for the university’s most vulnerable neighbors. At the decades’ end, the local newspaper, the Providence Journal, was reporting that, due to a shortage of housing in Fox Point, the neighborhood’s poorest residents were being displaced in large numbers, with these residents “unable to compete with students and others who are able to substantially outpay them” [58]. Brown leaders kept close tabs on the rents that their students faced in the private market and were keenly aware of the upward pressure on rents the influx of Brown student renters was having on the local housing market: According to internal university records, from 1960 to 1970, rents for standard 3-bedroom apartments in Brown’s surroundings rose, on average, 50 percent [56]. By decades’ end, the university was reporting that “the immediate community has reached or exceeded its capacity to gracefully absorb [the] University’s ‘off-campus’ housing” [59]. Local Fox Point leader Bernardino Delgado put it more succinctly, “The overall result of Brown’s expansion in off-campus living] has been the gradual destruction of the Fox Point community. Fox Pointers are being forced to leave their community so that other interests can benefit” [58].

For a flicker of a moment beginning in late 1969, Brown appeared poised to address this “gradual destruction” caused by its growing dependence on off-campus living, thanks to the advocacy of Fox Point residents and student activist allies. Fox Point community leaders like Charles Meleo Simon understood the critical need to contain the southward expansion of Brown student renters into the neighborhood. According to community scholar Andrade-Watkins, at one particularly contentious meeting of the Fox Point Neighborhood Association, Simon, after putting a finger in the face of Brown Fellow and Providence Preservation Society founder John Nicholas Brown, Jr., demanded that Brown prohibit undergraduate renters from moving south of Williams Street and east of Brooks Street, the boundaries between the neighborhoods of College Hill and Fox Point. Purportedly, Simon’s advocacy resulted in a “gentleman’s agreement” with Brown, though, as following paragraphs make clear, this agreement would prove insufficient in containing the spread of undergraduate renters for long [60].

Our research underscores that external community activists had important allies from within the university community. These allies, belonging to a student organization called the Ad Hoc Committee on Housing and University Expansion, bemoaned Fox Point’s housing shortage “created to a large extent by Brown” [55]. The committee noted that the intense influx of Brown students into a geographically compact and principally low-income area was dramatically restructuring the neighborhood’s housing market. The growing presence of Brown students in the neighborhood compelled profiteering landlords to look at Fox Point with a renewed interest. The net effect of these developments was “rapid upward pressure on rents”m which enticed further “speculation by absentee landlords who buy up houses, divide them into multiple dwelling units and rent them for as much as they can get” [55]. The Ad Hoc Committee observed the signs of displacement of Cape Verdeans were already evident as the neighborhood experienced a major loss of its non-white population during the 1960s and suffered from the construction of the interstate highway [55].

A newly formed university Community Relations Committee (CRC) echoed the Ad Hoc Committee, writing that “Brown must accept a large share of responsibility [in addressing this displacement] because it has had a large share in creating the problem. In light of what has and is happening to these people, we are not asking a great deal from Brown” [47]. The CRC and Ad Hoc Committee found a receptive audience in Acting President Merton Stoltz who agreed that university action in February 1970 was requisite and declared that the university would “do everything it legally can to dissuade students from living in Fox Point… where many lower-income families reside” [61]. The university promised to bring its off-campus undergraduate population back down to 500 and had students sign a waiver attesting that they would not rent in Fox Point. Remarkably, Brown even took initial promising steps in 1970 to build low-income housing for Fox Point community members on a vacant, university-owned property.

By 1969, many Brown leaders, like the university’s Vice President for University Relations Ron Wolk, believed that the university had a responsibility to build housing for low-income Fox Point community members to “help ease a housing problem in Fox Point that has been caused in part by the influx of Brown students into the area” [62]. University and community leaders agreed that the Bond Bread site—the former home of a bread-making factory, now owned by Brown—was the ideal location for such a housing development. The site, comprised of more than 40,000 square feet, was one of the largest pieces of undeveloped East Side land, and its location at the border of Brown’s campus with Fox Point promised the neighborhood meaningful protection from the university’s possible future southerly expansion [55]. University activists like the Ad Hoc Committee rejoiced at the potential of Brown’s planned development of the Bond Bread site, seeing it as an “opportunity to be of service to Fox Point” [55].

But almost immediately, Brown’s Bond Bread efforts were mired by community doubt and distrust, beginning with Brown’s appointment of Edward Sulzberger as project developer. Sulzberger, a Brown trustee (1965–1972) and New York City real estate developer, had just years before guided the “revitalization” of Providence’s South Main Street, an effort that had replaced the street’s once-dominant low-income, Lebanese community with a low-rise, middle-income development—“the Plantations”—targeted at Brown graduate students and young faculty [63]. Fox Pointers accurately assessed that Sulzberger’s loyalties lied with Brown. Sulzberger, acting on behalf of Brown, refused to follow the wishes of Fox Point residents who urged the developer to enlist the federal support of the Section 235 program of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, which would help to fund owner-occupied units for low-income families [64]. Sulzberger was adamant: Brown should not aid in the development of any properties on the Bond Bread site that the university could not recover in a few short years. Sulzberger confirmed community fear that the project’s apartments would soon be occupied by university affiliates, not community members, as Sulzberger openly shared with the Brown Daily Herald, the university’s student newspaper, his hope that the Bond Bread site apartments would one day soon be “rented to faculty and married grad students” [65]. Sulzberger publicly resented the sentiment of many Fox Point residents that the property be used to house community residents exclusively. “The fundamental aim of all housing today is an ethnically and economically mixed community, but Fox Point may want [the Bond Bread site] just for Fox Point” [65]. The idea that the property’s development express purpose was to offset Brown’s contribution to the dissolution of a once ethnically and economically mixed community did not, apparently, register with Sulzberger. With the community and university at an impasse over the future of the site, the community housing was never developed. The Bond Bread site would sit empty for almost two more decades, until six homes were moved to the site in the late 1980s [66]. Ironically, since their placement on the site, five of those six homes have been occupied by off-campus Brown undergraduates, as they continue to be to this day.

The collapse of the Bond Bread development—and the arrival of a new president, Donald Hornig, in October 1970—ushered in the end of Brown’s promising moment of acceptance of responsibility and accountability. Hornig focused the university on addressing a ballooning budget deficit and disbanded the increasingly critical CRC in 1973 [67]. Without the critical voice of internal dissent and accountability provided by the CRC and the Ad Hoc Committee—dissolved after the graduation of key student leaders—off-campus housing would surge to over 800 students by September 1974, up 300 students from less than just four years prior [68]. With time, Brown’s dependence on off-campus housing would only deepen: By 1988, more than 1400 Brown undergraduates were living off-campus [69].

For a short period of time, Brown’s housing policy compelled university leaders to critically assess and, for a moment, acknowledge the negative effects of its presence on its surrounding community. In that moment, credence was given to the idea that Brown’s presence in Providence created serious problems for vulnerable communities at its campus’s edge and that the university had a civic responsibility to commit to bold and sustained measures to correct this impact. However, as the students who pressured their university graduated, as new presidents with new agendas were inaugurated, as committees of dissent were dissolved, and as the communities that suffered at the university’s expense were displaced, that moment faded.

3.3. The Janus-Faced Community Engagement of the Swearer Years

When Howard Swearer assumed Brown’s presidency in 1977, dramatic demographic and economic restructuring was in full thrust around the university’s campus. In the 1980s, Providence would experience “alarming outflows of middle-income homeowners and tax-paying businesses” [70]. Many of these “middle-income homeowners” were white. As the city’s middle class fled, Providence experienced massive inflows of low-income families, many from immigrant backgrounds. In the last quarter of the 20th century, Providence led the nation in its percentage increase in its Hispanic and Asian populations [71]. At the same time, Providence’s industrial sector—long the economic backbone of the city’s working class—collapsed, leaving many of those incoming immigrant populations with increasingly poor job prospects: Between 1960 and 1990, factory employment in Providence would decline by a staggering 55 percent—with more than half of that loss occurring in the 1980s [71].

Providence’s non-profits, chief among them Brown University, were becoming islands of wealth in an increasingly poor city. As traditional industry faded in Providence—losing more than 25,000 jobs in the period between 1976 and 1992—the city’s non-profit sector exploded, creating 15,000 jobs in that same timespan [70]. Meanwhile, the city’s non-profits were consuming an increasingly large percentage of Providence real estate—and removing that real estate from the city’s tax rolls. From 1989 to 1993 alone, the value of tax-exempt property in Providence increased by $178 million while, at the same time, the value of taxable property decreased by $141 million [70]. As deindustrialization, budget deficits, and declining employment opportunities shook Providence, city leaders turned to their non-profit anchor institutions for assistance.

To this end, Providence—and its most vulnerable residents—received from Brown an unreliable and often Janus-faced response. Howard Swearer’s presidency is often remembered for his commitment to university-sponsored public service or, using more modern language, “community engagement.” Swearer believed that through a commitment to service, a university could become “a rich community of responsiveness,” fulfilling a higher mission by addressing the concerns of the nation and the world [72]. However, Swearer believed that universities should invest in community engagement primarily for the benefits that such activity accrued to members of an internal university community, believing that service could positively transform the emerging young people of the 1980s by moving them away “from self-centeredness and conspicuous consumption to social responsibility” [73]. Indeed, Swearer was instrumental in advancing university-sponsored community engagement to new heights, both at Brown and across the nation. In November 1985, Swearer led the formation of the body that would become known as Campus Compact, a coalition of university presidents and chancellors that sought to “stimulate student participation in voluntary community service” [74]. Like Swearer himself, Campus Compact’s focus was on the development of community-conscious individual students appreciative of “the importance of their individual efforts to address social problems and to meet social needs” [75]. On Brown’s campus in 1986, Swearer founded the Center for Public Service, one of the first campus public service centers in the nation—renamed and rededicated in 1992 as the “Swearer Center” [76]. Today, the Swearer Center is a national leader in university-sponsored community engagement and engaged scholarship, working annually with more than 1200 Brown students and 80 community partners throughout the Providence region. The center, and its work, is a prime example of Ehlenz’s “fourth era.”

However, Swearer’s public service legacy is placed in a new light when juxtaposed with the university’s land dealings under his presidency. Swearer believed deeply that all individuals have a duty to serve their community, to use the resources they have been privileged to receive to support those less endowed, and to develop compassion for neighbors of different backgrounds. What is perplexing about the Swearer years, then, is the president’s failure to translate these individual duties into institutional duties. While he sought for all Brown community members to be compassionate in their dealings with society’s disadvantaged, Swearer fell short, in many respects, to model that compassion in how he led the university’s interaction with its most vulnerable neighbors.

Under Swearer, Brown began a massive effort to relinquish its under-used, peripheral properties in Fox Point. Ironically, this university decision was spurred in part by a decades-long effort at City Hall to contain the university’s physical growth through the enactment of an institutional zone around Brown’s campus. Eventually added to the city’s zoning ordinances in 1986, the institutional zone incentivized more dense development on already-owned university land while disincentivizing the continued acquisition of properties further from the campus’s core [77]. While celebrated by city leaders, the university’s release of an armada of under-used Fox Point properties sent shockwaves through the university’s surrounding neighborhoods. Many of the properties that the university prepared to relinquish were groups of adjacent homes, originally purchased by Brown with the hopes of one day demolishing them, consolidating the properties, and developing large-scale academic structures.

As Brown prepared to relinquish large swaths of Fox Point land and homes, community leaders pled for the university to sell neighborhood organizations the properties at a lower price, allowing the neighborhood groups the chance to counter the ongoing loss of affordable housing opportunities to which, the groups reminded leaders, the university was seriously contributing [78]. Claiming that the university’s sales of these properties would help to fund the construction of academic facilities in the campus’s core, Swearer refused the organizations’ requests, arguing that Brown needed to “realize as high a price as possible” from these properties’ sales to offset the university’s mounting costs for new buildings [79]. Swearer’s failure to accommodate these organizations would have serious impacts upon the neighborhood. In his response, Swearer failed to realize—or perhaps preferred to ignore—that Brown’s commitment to sell to the highest bidder invited private developers to take advantage of Brown’s new land policy in a manner that clearly disadvantaged long-time Fox Point residents. By refusing to accommodate these community organizations, Swearer opened the door for well-resourced developers to snatch up formerly university-owned land and redevelop it in a manner that would change the neighborhood’s character.

Brown’s property relinquishment frequently had catastrophic effects for individual residents—as it did for the Delgados, an elderly, low-income Cape Verdean couple who had for nearly two decades lived in a Fox Point home on John Street that they rented from Brown’s landholding company, Fairview, Inc. In the summer of 1984, Brown sold a string of homes on John Street—including that of the Delgados—and told their tenants that they had three months to vacate the property [66]. As the date of the couple’s forced removal approached, community activist Larry Novick urged Brown to accommodate the Delgados. Robert Reichley, Brown’s Executive Vice President for University Relations, urged President Swearer to ignore Novick’s advocacy: “I fail to see why we should do anything…We are not ‘evicting’ the Delgados, at least not in the dictionary sense of the word” [80]. With no shortage of vindication, Reichley added “Perhaps if they had come and quietly raised the question, I might feel differently. I doubt it.” Swearer took Reichley’s advice, and Novick’s petition on behalf of the Delgados went unanswered. After the couple was forced from their home, Novick wrote one final letter to Swearer, sharing his disappointment regarding Brown’s “apparent lack of sensitivity in the involuntary displacement of an elderly, minority family” and the university’s “reluctance to enter into any meaningful dialogue concerning this displacement. It is imperative at this time,” wrote Novick, “for all concerned to realize what has happened in order for it never to occur again, not in Fox Point nor in any other area of the city of Providence where Brown, or its wholly-owned real estate subsidiary Fairview, Inc., intends to dispose of property” [81].

The Swearer legacy is complicated—and verges on paradoxical. As much as any university president throughout the nation during his time, Swearer recognized the important opportunities for student development that lay in community engagement. He put the institution’s weight and resources behind this community engagement in an unprecedented fashion. However, Swearer’s own engagement with the vulnerable communities just beyond Brown’s edge was highly imperfect. He often failed to practice the compassion for vulnerable communities that he preached, disregarding the suffering that university policy could unleash, while discrediting the undeniable evidence of Brown-sponsored displacement. The President Declaration of the Campus Compact (originally adopted in 1999), states, “only by demonstrating the democratic principles we espouse can higher education effectively educate our students to be good citizens” [82].

Figure 2, Figure 3, Figure 4, Figure 5, Figure 6 and Figure 7 indicate the neighborhood locations of undergraduate off-campus residences during the period of 1942–1990 [83,84,85,86,87]. These maps support an important trend documented through our archival research: beginning in the 1960s Brown students moved further from Brown’s campus core in the neighborhood of College Hill into surrounding East Side neighborhoods like the working-class community of Fox Point. Figure 8 summarizes these locations, indicating that while most off-campus Brown undergraduates lived close to the College Hill campus and the percentage of students housed on campus fluctuated, the percentage of off-campus undergraduates living in Fox Point rose dramatically from 1960–1990.

Table 1. Census racial classification of households 1950–1980 Providence RI and East Side neighborhoods.

	1950		1960		1970		1980
Geographic Area 1	Total Occupied Housing Units/ Total Housing Units	Percent Non-White 2	Total Occupied Housing Units/ Total Housing Units	Percent Non-White 3	Total Occupied Housing Units/ Total Housing Units	Percent “Negro” 3	Total Occupied Housing Units/Total Housing Units	Percent Black 4
City of Providence		3.10%		4.90%		7.60%
	72,259/		67,982/		68,122/		60,157/
	74,212		73,027		68,163		67,535	10.70%
East Side		9.10%		10.00%		9.70%
(CTs 30–37)	14,338/		13,135/		12,842/		13,327/
	14,926		14,020		13,534		14,230	9.50%
College Hill		2.70%		5.10%		3.50%
(CT 36)	1606/		1877/		1788/		1697/
	1691		2047		1888		1815	2.70%
Fox Point		18.80%		16.20%		8.60%
(CT 37)	2115/		1916/		1728/		1829/
	2183		2090		1870		1992	5.30%

¹. CT = census tract. The CT boundaries for Fox Point and College Hill closely, but not perfectly, align with the neighborhood boundaries. ². For 1950 enumerators classified households by race of the head of household. ³. For 1960 households self-identified their racial classification. ⁴. For 1980, racial classifications included white, black, or the categories of American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, Asian, and Pacific Islander. Households self-identified their racial classification. Note: The census racial classification system changed during this period and classification of the Cape Verdean population did not neatly align with the census classification systems—see Methods section. Sources: 1950 (Table 3) 1960 (Table H-1) 1970 (Table H-1) and 1980 (Table H-1) Census of Population [88,89,90,91].

indicates the shift in population the Fox Point community groups and university members recognized and raised in discussions about student housing choices, following the highway construction and urban renewal, early in this period. The data is derived from the U.S. Census Bureau [88,89,90,91]. The loss of housing units for Fox Point is related to the building of I-195, and the South Main Street urban renewal project. This table comes with some important cautions about race classification methodologies. The census racial classification system changed during this period and classification of the Cape Verdean population has never neatly aligned with the census approach. Categorizing the racially fluid immigrant communities of the East Side has long confounded “American social conditioning and bureaucratic pigeonholers” [92]. Many Cape Verdeans derive lineage from multiple continents and cultures. Adding to this binary forced fit, is the fact in 1950 enumerators classified households, and in 1960 forward, households self-identified racial classification. As such, an East Side Cape Verdean resident may have been identified as “white” by an enumerator, or self-identified as “non-white” in 1960 but not as “negro” in 1970, nor “black” in 1980.

Both Fox Point and College Hill experienced a substantial decline in “non-white” households over the decades of 1950–1980. This table is not meant to attribute a direct causal connection between this full decline and Brown’s student housing practices. Rather, it is offered as background to the larger community and university narrative documented in the archives. The Fox Point documentaries mentioned earlier speak to the various forms of involuntary displacement (direct demolition due to the highway and urban renewal, rent increases, property sales, and student encroachment) and voluntary leaving that was driven by the loss of neighborhood identity and social networks, and the opportunity to cash out. Some residents who remained in the neighborhood speak to experiencing a type of alienation akin to placelessness within the initial neighborhood boundaries [40,41].

4. Discussion

This piece of Brown University’s history epitomizes the evolutionary arc of IHE anchor roles laid out by scholars. The motivations and decisions on student housing reflect a shift from housing students at an inward looking “island” amidst an urban sea, to providing choice in student accommodation, including periods of deliberate enrollment increases with the presumed use of private off-campus housing. Brown bought and demolished buildings to create student housing, created systems for matching students to off-campus housing, used a real estate shell to buy and rent off-campus housing to students, and disposed of land banked properties to the highest bidder. These choices are consistent with the narrow lens of market efficiency used by many IHE in real estate dealings.

Ultimately, calls, from internal voices, for the university to protect the adjacent working-class neighborhood of color fell on deaf ears, and concerns raised by neighborhood advocates were summarily dismissed. As noted, Brown did, for a short period, incorporate concern for student encroachment by having undergraduate applicants for off-campus living sign a commitment to not rent in the adjacent working-class neighborhood. At the same time, a direction of development was curtailed in deference to powerful historic preservation groups (not distinct from Brown’s sphere of influence) that had defined specific histories as worthy of protecting. While, ironically, a national leader for the fourth era academic anchor work of civically engaged IHE (including public education partnerships), during this period Brown failed to integrate its corporate decisions on student housing and real estate holdings into a place-based mutual gains approach. Brown is not unique in using real estate to support other IHE functions, nor in contributing to the displacement of adjacent households of color. Case studies of the University of Pittsburgh, University of Illinois Chicago, and University of Cincinnati, reveal similar approaches and missed opportunities during this period [28,93,94].The historical internal documents of Brown University are, however, instructive illustrations of the distinctions between fourth and fifth era anchor work characteristics.

This case study also captures some of the dangers of the partial engagement of an anchor orientation. As Rio and Loggins note,

Communities read universities as coherent wholes. If one part of the university undertakes serious anchor work, but other parts of the university rest on traditional power dynamics that locate higher education above and apart from a community’s everyday life, campus leaders should expect distrust from the community and criticism from engaged faculty and students.

[95] (p. 41)

Within this history are examples of the diffuse nature of IHE power. While Brown did not directly undertake urban renewal projects, one project was directed by a Brown trustee and developers designed housing in urban renewal areas with Brown graduate students and new faculty as the intended renters. The historic preservation organization that came to shape the direction and types of redevelopment embraced in the city, was made up of Brown affiliates (alumni, donors, faculty spouses) and had board leadership from a top Brown administrator and a Brown trustee.

Another noticeable feature of this history is the independence of IHE in making student housing decisions. As a private IHE, Brown increased undergraduate and graduate enrollment, without a concurrent and proportional provision of student housing. While real estate is one of the more regulated IHE engagement arenas, and Providence was an early adopter of Institutional Zoning, the city adheres to a common norm of not directly regulating the capacity of IHE to meet student housing needs (and Brown is only one of four major residential campuses in the city). Generally, IHE decisions on enrollment and program expansion do not require a regulatory analysis of housing impacts or face requirements such as maintaining a certain percentage of on-campus residency. It should be noted Brown has expanded dormitory options over time, and as shown here, acquisition and redevelopment to house students was not without its own controversy. Also, of note, the archives contained little documentation of university consideration to graduate student housing.

The general lack of municipal regulation of these impacts is worthy of more study. While development regulations are intended to mitigate externalities of different land uses (such as requiring adequate on-site parking or treatment of storm-water runoff) IHE student housing capacity is rarely considered in the same manner. Likely this has its origins in the unique non-profit, public good orientation of universities, and from protections of educational uses that are built into some zoning legislation. There are indications the arena of municipal regulation of student housing is evolving. In the same way that host communities looked to IHE for payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) contributions when revenues declined, the urban housing affordability crisis is forcing municipalities to seek more comprehensive data on local housing markets and to actively negotiate with IHE around student housing needs and impacts (such as using Community Benefit Agreements). For example, Boston’s 2014 University Accountability Ordinance requires IHE to provide annual data for student on and off campus housing arrangements and the city has set a 2030 goal for a 50% increase of on-campus student housing [96,97] (p. 80).

This history illustrates how IHE attitudes toward student housing models, shaped by a larger cultural context, can change over time. Brown’s desire to create a fully residential experience spawned a strong historic preservation backlash, while increases in off-campus student living gave rise to displacement pressures. Clearly increasing on-campus housing may go hand in hand with an enlarged footprint and an attendant direct loss of neighborhood housing. Models of student housing may continue to evolve, influenced by the redefined expectations of neighborhoods, universities, and municipalities. (The twenty-first century introduction of private purpose-built student housing is yet another example of this evolution but lies outside the time frame of this research.)

Brown’s actions were not the major force that led to the displacement of the adjacent residents. Neighborhood change is complex and affected by many actors and sectors, larger macro-economic forces, demographics, highway construction, industry sector decline, cultural change, increasing affluence, and more. Brown University can, however, be held accountable for the control it did have—control over its own development choices. This case study uncovers how the university rebuffed several opportunities to use resources to preserve elements of its neighboring working-class community of color and pursued self-interest by expanding the student body without providing on-campus housing. While it is not certain that different choices by Brown would have preserved the already physically redefined Fox Point community, it is also unknown if other choices or partnerships might have sustained more of the neighborhood’s remaining social fabric.

5. Conclusions

Lessons emerge from history, and the learnings from this account can be applied to the ascending themes for IHE anchor work mentioned earlier. The movement toward outcome measures and assessments must integrate issues of displacement, studentification, and gentrification. IHE anchors do not take on this difficult work alone, as pioneering interventions are being generated within other sectors [98]. Anchor engagement work can look to the maturing literature on displacement that offers new conceptualizations of the multi-dimensionality of displacement (physical, social, cultural) and insights on methods for measuring displacement [38,43,99]. Also needed is a deeper understanding of the role of student housing choices in housing submarkets. The variety of local housing market conditions, the difficulty of controlling for relevant other forces, and the range of IHE characteristics, make it difficult to generalize about student housing models, but more can be learned. Research on the direct and indirect, and negative and positive impacts of student housing models on host communities is needed.

In addition, IHE need to assess their structural capabilities for undertaking what we see as the sixth era of IHE anchor work, centering social equity. IHE and community cohabitation of place is often characterized by tensions inherent in power differentials. IHE have established partnerships and review bodies of various forms for anchor work. In this case study, an internal institutional body was disbanded, and its recommendations ignored. This suggests community boards may need to get their authority from municipal government. Case studies provide examples of successful and unsuccessful models of community involvement, and the highly individualized nature of anchor work, noted earlier, will be reflected in this feature [18,100,101]. Being place-based is the characteristic that gives anchor institutions potential for meaningful engagement. At the same time, being place-based comes with a responsibility to acknowledge and respect the living history of a place by heeding the interests of less powerful residents [8]. In Hi, Neighbor Memories of Loss and Displacement, the filmmaker, Andrade-Watkins, “asks” John Nicholas Brown, Jr. why it was that he and his fellow white, wealthy residents remained on the East Side while she, and many Cape Verdean families like hers, were pushed from their Fox Point homes [40]. No doubt part of the answer to this rhetorical question lies with forces beyond the campus. Progress by IHE toward social equity will require intentional work around community involvement and community capacity, along with confronting the direct and indirect sources of IHE power and influence. The social equity components of student housing policies should be part of this work.